Examples of American Literature

Last month in this space, historian Steven Mintz previewed his forthcoming history of modern American adulthood by taking up recent commentaries on the death of adulthood in American culture. Below, Mintz turns to American literary treatments of grown-up life, which have more often depicted coming of age as a struggle against new constraints than as an entrée to independence.

American literature has long had a problem with adulthood. The most obvious examples, of course, are found among the post-World War II generation of writers, from John Updike and Mary McCarthy to J.D. Salinger, who associated adulthood with stagnation and stress, with heavy drinking, marital discontent, adultery, and despair.

Critical treatments of adulthood escalated during the 1960s and 1970s in such novels as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. The authoritative father who knows best came under attack as uncommunicative, emotionally withdrawn, and bottled up, while the self-denying, sacrificing mother became not an ideal to emulate, but a cautionary example of how women, mistakenly, forfeited their individuality and self-fulfillment for their husband’s sake.

Yet well before the 1950s and 1960s, American literature tended to paint a bleak picture of adulthood. Men come off particularly poorly. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain presents his readers with a rogues gallery of hucksters, charlatans, braggarts, con men, and cheats. Huck’s own father, Pap, is an ignorant, abusive drunk. From Melville’s monomaniacal Ahab and his depressed, deeply alienated Bartleby, to Henry James’s unfulfilled Lambert Strether, Edith Wharton’s “ruin of a man, ” Ethan Frome, Dreiser’s greedy, ambitious, opportunistic Clyde Griffiths, and Sinclair Lewis’s narrow-minded, complacent, materialistic George F. Babbitt, fictional images of manhood were replete with examples of men with cramped emotional lives, loveless marriages, and work lacking opportunities for meaning and fulfillment. Each offered a vivid example of the life of quiet desperation and despair identified by Thoreau.

Nor were the female characters more attractive, though the critique of womanhood took very different forms. To be sure there were casually misogynistic images of womanhood, as in Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly, kind hearted, but also a superstitious, somewhat feeble-minded, scold. More influential, however, were women whose romantic yearnings were quashed or whose quest for independence ends in tragedy, as in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In stories as different as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, we witness the unbending pressures on women to abandon their headstrong independence and conform to the responsibilities and proprieties of conventional womanhood. Henry James’s most memorable characters were women, and many of his plots centered on the tribulations of womanhood, exploring the lives of naïve, unaffected, innocent roses amidst a thicket of thorns or of free spirits “affronting their destiny.” Then there are the emotionally tortured women in the stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor and the plays of William Inge and Tennessee Williams.

Source: harvardpress.typepad.com

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Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels, An English-Language Selection, 1946-1987 is a nonfiction book written by David Pringle, published by Grafton Books in 1988 (UK); next year by Peter Bedrick Books (US). The foreword is by Brian W. Aldiss.
Primarily the book...